According to today's NY Times, the city's infamous ?rubber rooms? ? made more infamous by last year's Steven Brill New Yorker article ? are still around even if they have shed the name.
Brill's piece last August was a devastating indictment of the practice of putting suspected bad teachers in rooms, with full pay, doing nothing?? a wonderfully powerful way of picturing a system that wasn't working.?Brill even found a principal willing to accuse then NYC union boss Randi Weingarten of working to ?protect a dead body in the classroom? if she had to. ?(Then dead bodies,?now former prostitutes. See here.)
As the Times points out, the rubber rooms were ?the most obvious waste in the school system ? $30 million a years in salaries being paid to educators caught up in the glacial legal process required to fire them.?
And whether you call it spin, good politics, or action, Mayor Bloomberg went to work and last April announced an agreement with the unions to close the rooms, speed up the hearing process, and give suspended teachers administrative work while they waited for their cases to be settled.
According to today's story, the city has managed to resolve hundreds of cases and has at least been finding make-work for others ? such as measuring an entire building with a 25-foot tape measure (oh, the horror).? Though there are still plenty of $100,000-a-year folks just sitting around, the good news, says the Times is that there are 534 fewer of them today than last spring.
That's not chump change, ?even by NYC standards. Rubber cubicles?
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
